Hitler's Third Reich and World War II in the News is a daily edited review of WWII news, providing thought-provoking collection of hand-picked WW2 information.

WW2 category: Soviet Union  -- See latest WWII news here. See also 'Stalin's Purge', 'Russian WWII Tanks - T34', 'Dictator Joseph Stalin', 'Operation Barbarossa 1941-1945', 'Battle of Leningrad'.

Russian history professor arrested after researching Stalin era Arctic gulags     guardian.co.uk :: 2009-10-16
A Russian historian researching the Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during WW2 has been arrested, in the latest crackdown on historical study into the Stalin era. Mikhail Suprun - facing up to 4 years in jail - was seized by security officers, who also carried off his entire archive. Suprun's study covered German POWs captured by the Red Army as well as ethnic Germans. "What we are seeing is the rebirth of control over history. The majority of Russians don't have any idea of the scale of Stalin's repression. Those in power are from the KGB. They don't want people to know what their KGB predecessors were doing, or its huge scope," explained Rauf Gabidullin.    

Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)     rian.ru :: 2009-08-21
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a major factor in the start of World War II, was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939. It set the fate of the Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Moldavians as these nations were merged into the Soviet Union. In spite of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, the pact still otulines many geopolitical realities in Europe. The pact was signed by Foreign Ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. The pact included secret protocol (the original was found in the archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in the 1990s), which defined the Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.    

Innocent wives, mothers, sisters and daughters Stalin sent to a Gulag camp in Kazakhstan     eurasianet.org :: 2009-08-08
The women's faces gaze down from the walls, some look sad, some just confused. These women, from all over the Soviet Union, had been sent to gulag although they were not even suspected of any offense. Their crime? Being married to an enemy of the state, for which they were sent to this prison in Kazakhstan. This link in a chain called "The Gulag Archipelago" was called Alzhir, an acronym for the Akmola Camp for the Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. It was not only wives who were sent here, but mothers, sisters and daughters. There were also kids in Alzhir, and not just the offspring of "enemies of the people." 1937-1953 the camp saw 1,507 births by prisoners raped by guards.     [War, Women and Horror]

Russia's largest history site closed after criticising pro-Kremlin governor, who cut allowance of the survivors of Nazi siege     guardian.co.uk :: 2009-07-14
The home affairs ministry in St Petersburg closed Russia's biggest online history resource hrono.info - used by scholars worldwide as a unique source of historical material - saying it published extracts from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Vyacheslav Rumyantsev says the Mein Kampf is widely available elsewhere and his site only summarized it, adding that the authorities may have closed the site after an article criticised St Petersburg's pro-Kremlin governor, who cut an allowance to WW2 survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Recently police raided a human rights group, seizing the material (including interviews with gulag victims) used in "The Whisperers" by historian Orlando Figes.     [Soviet Union]

Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky by Bertrand Patenaude     ft.com :: 2009-06-15
Leon Trotsky spent the last 4 years of his life as an exile in Mexico, under verbal attack from papers and opponents and the threat of assassination. This Mexican visit proved fatal when Stalin decided to rid of his great rival. In this fascinating account, Bertrand Patenaude has created both a good biography of the revolutionary leader and an account of the violent world of international socialist politics in the 1930s. The most damning case against Trotsky is his intellectual dishonesty: to avoid downplaying his own achievement in the Revolution, Trotsky defended the idea of the USSR as a workers' paradise, even as it had become a totalitarian nightmare. [Buy from Amazon: US, UK, CA, DE, FR]    

Crimean Tatars mark anniversary of the mass deportations by Stalin     worldbulletin.net :: 2009-05-20
40,000 Tatars gathered in Crimean capital Simferopol to mark the 65th anniversary of their people's mass deportation by Josef Stalin and renew calls for greater post-Soviet rights. Within days of Crimea's retaking by Soviet Red Army forces, dictator Josef Stalin ordered the deportation of the region's Tatar population on grounds that they had collaborated with Nazis. On May 18, 1944, over 180,000 Crimean Tatars were loaded onto cattle trains and sent to Central Asia and Siberia. 40% perished in the first years of exile. The Muslim Tatars were only allowed to return to Crimea in 1989 under Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reform policies.    

Metal detectors and shovels - Russia still searching for World War II dead     afp :: 2009-05-08
Every spring searchers fan out across Russia's swamps and forests armed with metal detectors and shovels, searching for bones. Most are are just teenagers, their nails caked in the dirt of this valley near Moscow, where the Red Army's 32nd Rifle Division held Adolf Hitler's Nazi troops for 15 days in 1941. Their friends prepare to celebrate the May 9 Victory Day holiday by watching the military parade on Red Square, but the volunteers say the memory of the war is stronger here. 5 hours of seeking with metal detectors revealed an exploded helmet, a gas mask, bullets, leg bones, shrapnel, a pair of boots riddled with more bones and one mossy shoe.     [Red Army]

General Valentin Varennikov: Anti-Gorbachev plotter, battle of Stalingrad officer     latimes.com :: 2009-05-07
General Valentin Varennikov, a hawkish World War II veteran who and joined the rebellion against Mikhail Gorbachev that quickened the break down of the Soviet Union, passed away in Moscow at 85. He joined the Red Army after graduating from an officers' school in 1942 and was sent straight to the front. He was wounded 3 times and was among a group of war heroes who were given the honor of carrying seized Nazi banners and throwing them onto the pedestal of Lenin's tomb during a 1945 victory parade on Red Square. In 1984-1989 Varennikov served as the top Soviet military officer in Afghanistan. In 1988 he was awarded the highest Soviet decoration: the Hero of the Soviet Union medal.     [Soviet Union]

Russia to outlaw criticism of Soviet World War II military tactics which caused huge losses     telegraph.co.uk :: 2009-03-06
Russia wants to outlaw criticism of Soviet military tactics in the latest example of its heavy-handed approach to dissent. The plan comes after a documentary film revealed the scale of WW2 human losses, stirring emotions in a country that has glorified the heroic feats of soldiers during the Great Patriotic War but has often ignored the huge human cost behind the victory. The government sensed a chance to take advantage on the public mood at a time when the recession is threatening Putin's popularity. The law seeks to punish ex Soviet states which deny they were freed by the Red Army, and to make it illegal to suggest that the Soviet Union did not win the War.     [Strategy & Tactics - WW2 warfare]

To counter Ukraine charges of genocide, Moscow admits to mass murder     georgiandaily.com :: 2009-02-28
To counter claims that Stalin carried out a genocide in Ukraine in the 1930s, Moscow has released new files revealing the Soviet dictator engaged in a criminal campaign of mass murder across the entire Soviet Union. Vladimir Kozlov, of Russia's Federal Archives Agency, told that the famines were "the result of Stalin's criminal policy" but that "no one planned any famine. The famine was the result of the errors and miscalculations... documents testify that the chief enemy of Soviet power at that time was an enemy defined not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of class," in this case the peasantry which Stalin wanted to force to join collective farms.     [Soviet Union]

If the car was symbolic of freedom in the USA, what did it mean in the USSR     timesonline.co.uk :: 2009-01-30
"We are a class on wheels, the most revolutionary class in history... and a class that will travel to socialism in the automobile," stated Valerian Osinsky (top official in Gosplan, the State Planning Commission) in 1929. He is one of the key figures in "Cars for Comrades", Lewis H. Siegelbaum's chronicle of the automobilism in the USSR. Osinsky made a road trip across the US in 1925, and he led a journey across the USSR in 1929 to see which model might be best adapted for the USSR's dismal roads. Imperial Russia's auto industry was cut off by the October Revolution. By 1926, Automobile Factory No 1 was producing 366 "Prombon S24-40" cars (US made 4 million). [Buy from Amazon: US, UK, CA, DE, FR]     [World War II Cars]

History tour: Russia's World War II battlefields and war memorials     dailymail.co.uk :: 2009-01-27
The Russians do the biggest war memorials: and they are full of Nazi swastikas being trampled by the horses ridden by Soviet heroes. The 70th anniversary of the start of WW2 causes a huge increase in WWII touring: Normandy beaches, Pegasus bridge, V2 sites... all great tours but for the ultimate WWII tour is the Eastern Front, where 80% of the Germans killed in combat 1939-1945 died. The Soviet Armed Forces Museum has Stalin's coat, the red flag placed over the Reichstag, Hitler's personal standard, torpedoes, medals, swords. Next stop: Stalingrad, or the world's biggest tank museum at Kubinka (Tiger tanks, Porsche Ferdinands and every Russian tank model).     [WW2 Tours - History and Battlefields]

When Soviets and Nazis marched together: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact     georgiandaily.com :: 2008-09-24
69 years ago Soviet and Nazi German soldiers marched together in a military parade in Brest, only one month after Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin had concluded the non-aggression pact that made Third Reich and Soviet Union allies, opened the way for World War II, and led to Moscow's occupation of the eastern Europe for 50 years. Shortly after the Nazis invaded Poland, Soviet forces followed suit. The armies of the two totalitarian states came together at Brest. Instead of retreating to the lines agreed to, the German commander Heinz Guderian decided with Semen Krivoshein, the commander of the Soviet 29th tank brigade, to orchestrate a joint military parade.     [Soviet Union]

Volga Germans under Bolshevist atrocities     pr-inside.com :: 2008-09-20
After WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Russia went through mass starvation 1920-1924 caused mostly by a government policy of forced grain requisition. When the Volga Germans resisted, they were stripped of all grain and mass executions took place. 30% of the Volga German population was starved before help was allowed. Starting in 1921, the Volga Relief Society in U.S. raised money and bought supplies for the starving Volga Germans. The cruelties against the Volga Germans was better brought out to the world in 1922 when John Hermann traveled back to Sheboygan, Wisconsin and told his story of survival and escape from the Soviet Union.    

Medicine in the Gulag Archipelago to be studied     bbc.co.uk :: 2008-08-15
Dan Healey has got a grant of 101,000 pounds to study the history of medicine in Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin's concentration camps. He is hoping to show how doctors and medicine were built-in to the labour camps from the 1930s to the 1950s. The Gulag was the network of camps, located in the most outback areas of the Soviet Union. 20 million people passed through the camps and countless died. The 3-year-project will also focus on the accounts by Gulag survivors, including memoirs by doctors and nurses, to tell the story of how inmates received (and failed to receive) medical care in the camps.    

70 reclaimed villages from 1930s to emerge from Stalin-era reservoir     buzzle.com :: 2008-08-12
70 villages flooded on Joseph Stalin's orders during the 1930s to build a huge hydroelectric power plant are set to rise again as part of a plan to drain and reclaim the land. A huge lake was created near the town of Ribinsk in April 1941, when two dams were built across the Volga to provide hydroelectric power. 130,000 people were resettled by the NKVD as the river swallowed dozens of villages and the historic town of Mologa. 300 people died, refusing to leave their homes - many simply taken away to the Gulag. Nikolai Novotelnov, a former inhabitant, explains how the fear of the NKVD was so great that people just did not talk about the plan, even in their own homes.    

Review: Stalin's Iron Fist by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov     telegraph.co.uk :: 2008-08-09
"We should shoot a pretty large number... no trials are necessary. Everything can be done in a simplified process," wrote Nikolai Yezhov to Stalin as he let loose the Great Terror in 1937. Yezhov - 'Iron Fist' aka 'Bloody Dwarf' - was the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, chief of the secret police, the NKVD, and the second most powerful man in Russia. This butcher appears in history for two years in the mid-1930s and disappears just as quickly - after Stalin liquidated him in his turn. In 1937 he suggested to Stalin the start of a purge in which about a million people were killed, adding that most of the victims should be chosen at random.     [Stalin's Purge]

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis     economist.com :: 2008-08-08
The Soviet Union let American workers, desperate for jobs and a new start in life, immigrate there in the early 1930s. Exactly how many, nobody knows, because nearly all ended up in mass graves. At first glorified as welcome refugees from the miseries of capitalism, from 1935 onwards they became enemies - except a handful used as propaganda trophies. The rest sank into a living Hades of torture, rape, slave labour and death. The horrors of the Gulag should be as well known as Auschwitz, but they aren't. U.S. ambassador Joseph Davies was a Stalin-loving art collector. When the case of a missing American was brought up by an assistant, he apologised to the Russians.     [Soviet Union]

Anti-Stalin legend Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about life under Stalin's regime     mirror.co.uk :: 2008-08-05
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was granted the Nobel prize for his novels about life under Stalin's regime, passed away at the age 89. His novels laid bare the inhumanity of the Soviet system. "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" (1963) gave a graphic account of the cruelties endured by those imprisoned in Stalin's labour camps. The book was mostly autobiographical: Solzhenitsyn was seized in 1945, while serving in the Red Army, for criticising Stalin in a letter. He was sentenced to 8 years, and sent to camp in Kazakhstan. His main work was the massive Gulag Archipelago, which revealed the years of Stalinist terror by telling of thousands of cases in detail.    

They wanted to believe in Communism, but after experiencing it they were disillusioned     zwire.com :: 2008-07-29
Lawrence and Sylvia Hokkanen left United States in 1934 for the promise of a better life in the Soviet Union, believing in the "worker's paradise." Life in the Soviet Union was both demanding and rewarding: The food was poor and there was no indoor plumbing but they were united with their fellows in the dream of being part of "the worker's paradise" in Petrozavodsk. As Stalin's purges spread they wondered "How can they all be guilty?" By 1938 they were desperate to get out. After long delays they reached U.S. soil in 1941 "thoroughly disillusioned" with communism. "Karelia, A Finnish-American Couple in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941" tells their story.    

Survey: Russian museums missing 50,000 items - Medals, weapons, jewelry     usatoday.com :: 2008-07-18
An audit has shown that up to 50,000 pieces are missing from Russia's museums. Putin ordered the audit after his government was humiliated in 2006 by hundreds of thefts from the crown jewel of Russia's art world, St. Petersburg's Hermitage gallery. Over 1,600 museums have been scrutinised and most of them have items missing. Most of the disappeared inventory was pre-Revolutionary and Soviet-era medals, weapons and clothes. Russian museums do not have computerized records, some items have handwritten descriptions in Soviet-era log books, but most only have a single-line description, making tracking them almost impossible.     [Memorials and Museums]

The story of Stalin's persecution of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century     washingtonpost.com :: 2008-07-12
Gulags, mass murders, wars, starvation: The history of the Soviet Union is not short of tragedies. But the Bolshevik Revolution also put down culture, literature, art and science in ways that are not simple to list and count. Though it is also the story of a man who was physically destroyed by Stalin's secret police, "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" by Peter Pringle, is mainly an account of these subtler forms of damage. Nikolai Vavilov - on the cutting edge of the then-new science of genetics - was one of the greatest of all Russian scientists. Yet even before his death in a KGB prison in 1943, he had been mentally ruined by a twisted scientific establishment.     [Soviet Union]

Russia bans Hitler's Table Talk: 1941-1944 by prominent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper     reuters.com :: 2008-07-09
A Russian court has banned a history book about Adolf Hitler by the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, saying quotes (like "Russians are beasts," "Slavs are a mass of inborn slaves") attributed to the Nazi leader insult Russians. Under anti-extremism laws the court banned "Hitler's Table Talk: 1941-1944" (1953), which records Adolf Hitler's occasionally racist ramblings on a range of topics. Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote one of the classic histories of the fall of Nazi Germany: "The Last Days of Hitler". The book will now be put on a list of extremist works that are banned and owning or distributing it would then be illegal.     [Historians, Authors of World War II]

After Soviet soldiers seized all the food, man killed her 6-year-old daughter to eat her     timesonline.co.uk :: 2008-06-24
Grigori Garaschenko remembers his classmates starving slowly to death in a famine that killed millions in Ukraine. A neighbour - driven mad by hunger - killed her 6-year-old daughter and began to eat her, after Soviet soldiers seized all the food. Garaschenko is one of the few living survivors of the famine of 1932-1933. Now Ukraine wants the world to recognise the Holodomor - a deliberate act of genocide by Stalin's Soviet Union. Moscow argues that there was no such crime, because Russians also suffered from lack of food under Joseph Stalin's policy of turning peasant farms into large state-run collectives.     [Soviet Union]

Secret Cities of the Soviet Union     mentalfloss :: 2008-05-28
Construction on the Soviet Union's secret cities began during the early 1940s, and by the 1980s there were at least 57 secret colonies with a population of 1.5 million. Their existence was a secret among ordinary people until the end of the USSR. Since 1991 some of the cities have been opened, but experts think there are still 15 secret cities. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin ordered factories shipped to safe locations beyond the Ural Mountains. These towns set up the pattern for later secret cities. Employees were forbidden to leave, and everything was monitored by the NKVD.    

The Soviet Story: Helping nazis and slaughtering soviet people on an industrial scale     sovietstory.com :: 2008-04-11
"The Soviet Story" tells of an Allied power, which helped Nazi Germany instigate the Holocaust and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945 and tts crimes were made taboo. The entire story of Europe's most murderous regime has never been told, until now, with recently uncovered archive documents and interviews with Soviet military intelligence officers... The topics include: The Great Famine in Ukraine (1932-1933), the Katyn massacre (1940), the SS-NKVD partnership, soviet mass deportations, medical experiments in the GULAG.    

Nikolai Baibakov, the last living commissar who served under Stalin, dies     nytimes :: 2008-04-03
Nikolai K. Baibakov, who supervised Russian oil production during World War II and was one of the Soviet Union's top economic officials, died at 97. He recalled meeting with Stalin in July 1942. Adolf Hitler was advancing to the Caucasus to seize the strategically essential oil fields near Baku. Stalin pointed 2 fingers at Baibakov's head: "If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot. And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again." He also established a pipeline under the ice to bring gasoline to besieged Leningrad.    

Russian tank hobbyist charged with extremism: Tank has Nazi insignia on its turret     theotherrussia :: 2008-04-01
Tank enthusiast Vyacheslav Verevochkin in the Novosibirsk oblast is facing charges of extremism as prosecutors have started a probe into 2 battle tanks he built. The case began after a road-worthiness race between the man's tanks and modern SUVs. One of the tanks had Nazi insignia on its turret. "I restored those tanks that were used during the war. How could there even be mention of any kind of extremism? This is history." Aleksei Voytov, the lead prosecutor, said: "The public display of Nazi symbolism and attributions as an insult to the victims of the Great Patriotic War."     [Soviet Tanks : T34]

Russian couple reunited after 60 years apart because of Stalin's purges     telegraph.co.uk :: 2008-01-13
When Anna Kozlov caught sight of the elderly man struggling out of a car in Borovlyanka, she stopped dead in her tracks. There, in front of her, was Boris, the man she had fallen in love with and married 60 years earlier. The last time she had seen him was 3 days after their wedding, when she kissed him goodbye and sent him off to rejoin his Red Army unit. By the time he travelled back, Anna was gone, consigned by Stalin's purges to exile in Siberia with her family as an enemy of the people. Without leaving forwarding address. Now they were reunited, an extraordinary coincidence resulting them both to travel back to their home village on the very same day.     [Stalin's Purge]

Polish women jailed under Stalin recall horrors of torture     iht :: 2008-01-04
Janina Wojnarowska lifts her blouse to show the thin white scar where part of her breast used to be: before her time in a Stalin-era prison. "I could not feed my son during ... the interrogation, they kept us by open windows in winter, and the breast got black and then hard as stone." A doctor had to partly amputate it. She went on caring for her son in a cell where she was fed rotten cabbage. 5,000 women were jailed 1944-1958 under the communist regime enforced by the Soviet Union after Josef Stalin's troops invaded Poland. The women had lasted a 6-year occupation by Nazi Germany, only to be subjected to investigations on charges of spying for the West.     [War, Women and Horror]

New online site helps Russians trace war dead     russiatoday :: 2007-12-28
19 million documents stored in the archives of Russia's Defence Ministry have been digitalised. The aim of the project was to help people locate or learn more about relatives killed or never found during the Second World War. Now, the site www.obd-memorial.ru makes it possible people looking for their lost friends and relatives to carry out their own probes into what happened. Records include not only the name, date and place of birth and death, but also scans of original documents.    

The Whisperers - Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes     nytimes :: 2007-11-24
For many years the intellectual protestors like Eugenia Ginzburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "were widely greeted as the authentic voice of the silenced," telling us "what it had been like to live through the Stalin Terror." Their books did not represent what happened to millions of other people who were not opponents of the regime, but were still dispatched to labor camps or to summary execution. As Orlando Figes concludes in The Whisperers, his book about the impact of the gulag on "the inner world of ordinary citizens," a great many victims silently lived with the system's basic values and its rules.    

Great Terror haunts Russia: 34 skeletons of Stalin's purges found     guardian :: 2007-10-10
The skeletons of 34 people have been found along with a 1903 Browning pistol in a Moscow basement, most likely the site of a massacre carried out during the Great Terror, the purge by Stalin in the 1930s. The remains were found during a renovation at 8/1 Nikolskaya Street, a mansion halfway between Red Square and the Lubyanka, the former headquarters of the KGB. Skull fragments found at the scene had bullet marks that showed the people had been shot in the head at close range. Up to 1 million opponents of Soviet power were executed during the Great Terror. The killing reaching its zenith in 1937 when the NKVD sent 1,000 people a day to their deaths.     [Soviet Union]

Highly-decorated WWII Soviet Red Army soldier charged with genocide     bbc :: 2007-08-23
Arnold Meri, former Soviet Communist Party official in Estonia and a highly-decorated soldier in the Soviet Red Army, has been charged with genocide for his alleged role in deportations to Siberian labour camps. He is said to have organised the 1949 deportation of 251 civilians from Hiiumaa Island. Meri has admitted participating, but says he played a minor role. Estoniam authorities say more than 40 of those deported died. Estonia has been gradually attempting to prosecute those who helped in the deportation of 20,000 Estonians to Siberian camps after World War II.    

Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During World War II     juneauempire :: 2007-08-10
During WWII, Soviet Army officer Boris Dolitsky in Siberia and couldn't help but notice the influx of American goods pouring into the country. But he was like many of the Soviet people, who knew little about the scope of the 4-year Alaska-Siberia Lend-Lease Program, which shuttled 8,000 aircraft and billions of dollars' worth of goods during its 31-month run 1942-1945. Much of that was the raw material that enabled the Soviet military's mobility. "This chapter of history was sort of forgotten," said Alexander Dolitsky, Boris' son, and the author of "Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During World War II."    

The forgotten lessons of WWII: Nazi Victory not bad say 33% in Russia     rian :: 2007-06-23
7 years ago, I helped to conduct a poll of students in 4 Russian cities with dismaying results. Only 34% knew when the war began; 93% said American, British and French forces had aided the Red Army in the capture of Berlin in 1945; and 81% knew nothing about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. The situation has probably gotten worse since then. Only 20% of students in Krasnoyarsk could say anything about the events of June 22, 1941. Worst of all, young people are beginning to think differently: When asked what would have happened to the USSR in the event of a Nazi victory, 33% of students in Moscow said the defeat would not have had any negative consequences.     [Polls: Public opinion of World War II]

Soviet era Posters are now art - Propaganda before Perestroika     sundayherald :: 2007-05-06
Posters of the Soviet era are now regarded as art. But back then they were a means to motivate and control workers behind the Iron Curtain. Imagine that you have just seized control of a country in a bloody revolution. Your rallies have attracted huge crowds, but the country is vast and communications primitive. Newspapers are the only source for those who can read, but millions are illiterate. So, how to become Big Brother? 1918-1921 over 3500 posters were printed at a rate of 20 a week to get Lenin's message across. In 1919 the artist Alexander Apsit developed the hammer and sickle and the red star, soon to become the iconic images of the Soviet communist era.     [WWII Posters]

Half of all neo-nazis live in Russia: Nazism and WWII remembrance     vlad.tribnet.com :: 2007-05-05
While Russia prepares to celebrate its victory over the Nazi regime in World War 2 on May 9, known as the Great Patriotic War, neo-Nazi groups escalated hate crimes in observance of the birthday of Adolph Hitler in late April. As of 2005 the total number of skinheads in Russia, as reported by the Moscow Human Rights centre, amounted to 50,000 members, with active cells operating in at least 85 cities. This amount is nearly half of the world's total registered population of skinheads, making Russia the hotbed of Neo-Nazi activism worldwide.     [Soviet Union]

Moscow allow neo-Nazis to mark birthday of Adolf Hitler     fsumonitor :: 2007-04-27
Article no longer available from the original source.
Moscow granted permission for neo-Nazis to publicly mark the birthday of Adolf Hitler, a man who once planned to wipe the Russian capital off the face of the earth. Around 350 extremists rallied in front of the presidential administration's building in Moscow on April 21, screaming neo-Nazi slogans and making the fascist salute as police looked casually on - despite the fact that under Russian law the public incitement of ethnic hatred is illegal. Pictures of the rally were posted on Radio Liberty's site.     [Hitler's birthday: Birth date of Adolf Hitler]

Did Uncle Joe Win the War - the Russo-German War of 1941-1945     russiablog :: 2007-04-12
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union sparked the bloodiest campaign in history, and Benjamin Schwarz agrees with the latest crop of books that dismiss the Anglo-American WWII effort as a sideshow. He credits Josef Stalin for saving the Soviet Union from collapse, and allowing his generals like Georgy Zhukov to lead the Red Army to victory. Nevermind that Stalin's dogged insistence allowed the invaders to encircle the Red Army's corps until they reached the gates of Moscow. Stalin's urge to immediately counterattack, while saving the Soviet capital, also led to another Red Army tank corps being cut off and chewed up by the Wehrmacht in the spring of 1942.     [Operation Barbarossa - WWII Eastern Front]

The cannibal hell of Stalin's prison island     timesonline :: 2007-04-10
Thousands of Soviet-era prisoners rounded up in Joseph Stalin's brutal purges were dumped without food or shelter on a remote island in Siberia where they turned to cannibalism, according to documents from a former KGB archive. More than 4,000 of the 6,000 prisoners abandoned on Nazino, an inhospitable slip of land in a river 1,500 miles northeast of Moscow, died in less than 4 weeks in the late spring of 1933. A new book, Cannibal Island, draws on documents and witness accounts that have been kept secret for 7 decades. Historian Nicolas Werth reveals that hundreds of people were shot by guards or drowned as they tried to flee the island on makeshift rafts.     [Stalin's Purge]

From Russia with fear - where Adolf Hitler's birthday is holiday     hindustantimes :: 2007-02-26
Moscow's Indian School, for the expatriate Indians, may be the only place in the world where Adolf Hitler's birthday is marked as a holiday. Fearful of attacks by racist Skinheads, whose activity tends to peak around the April 20 anniversary, it has ordered its students and staff to stay home on that day. That's just one illustration of the strange restrictions and constant fears that dominate the lives of some 15,000 Indian expatriates living in Russia. The worries about Skinhead violence are genuine enough: At least 50 people were killed in racist attacks on Russian streets last year.     [Hitler's birthday: Birth date of Adolf Hitler]

Horrors of Russian Front - World War II as Red Army soldiers     startribune :: 2006-05-29
Memorial Day is a somber time for a group of Minnesotans who saw WWII as Red Army soldiers. They can't help but think about Red Army soldiers who weren't lucky enough to avoid the staggering death tolls of the Eastern Front. Now US citizens, Geykhman and Grichener don't diminish the sacrifices of the 300,000 American troops killed. But for every US soldier killed more than 30 Russians died. Grichener was forced into the Red army as a teenager. "Those giving the orders said it wasn't our job to help, go ahead and fight. An infantry soldier was worth nothing, not a penny. Stalin treated us like slabs of meat and pushed us in front of the enemy until they ran out of lead."     [Red Army]

Soviet World War II Awards of Great Patriotic War     RIA Novosti :: 2005-02-21
Soviet officers and soldiers displayed great heroism during the 1941-1945 Great Patriotic War, and virtually every man and woman regardless of rank was decorated for bravery. Recommendations continuously arrived in Moscow from the front. In the midst of bloody battles, when critical situations arose time and again, a number of award recommendations were either lost on the front or later in archives. The Russian state has not yet fulfilled its sacred duty to its war heroes. In all, 1.5 million wartime awards still have to be presented.     [WWII Medals & Most decorated Soldiers]

See also:
'Stalin's Purge'
'Russian WWII Tanks - T34'
'Dictator Joseph Stalin'
'Operation Barbarossa 1941-1945'
'Battle of Leningrad'.

Although the articles linked from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich 1933-1945 and World War II in the News are reviewed and specially selected, they do not necessarily represent the views of the editor, who is not responsible for the content of any external sites. This service is © Joni Nuutinen 2005-2010. All rights reserved.